My Grandmother Is Turning in Her Grave

Robert E Lee Memorial, Sept. 2019. Photo © Mary Pawlowski. Picasa.

My beloved grandmother, Helena Lefroy Caperton, who lived her entire life in Richmond, Virginia within a few blocks of this statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue is turning—maybe spinning—in her grave there. She could never have imagined that the enormous statue towering over her hometown would be pulled down, carved up and crated off to an uncertain future as it was a week ago.

I grew up on her stories, many of which I recounted in my book The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters ( published by Sarabande Books). She visited my family in Louisville every spring when I was growing up there, spending two or three weeks in the four-poster bedroom I always associated with her violet-scented presence. When I came home from school in the late afternoon, she was usually the only family member in the house; I would knock timidly on her door and find that she was always glad to see me. She would be sitting on the chintz-covered chaise lounge, usually attaching lace to an elaborate party dress for one of her many granddaughters.

Almost at once, she would launch into her stories, some of which had been published in her two collections. Sometimes they were anecdotes rather than the short stories that would never be admissible today; she had the Daughters of the Confederacy attitude that—along with the similar mindset of the Daughters of the American Revolution—resulted in the erection of the Civil War generals’ statues all over the South. These often-giant figures were built with these organizations’ funds twenty or thirty years after the Civil War whose history and devastation they intended to warp to preserve a myth that had a religious aura for them: The Lost Cause. In that cause, they rewrote the disasters of slavery as well as the less than noble exploits of their male kin both during, before, and after the war. The South seems to have been very good at producing both these so-called heroes of battles and the more or less feckless men who, domestically, caused so much disappointment for my grandmother and many other women, mainly through what she called, “Drink and the Devil.”

The heroes, so-called, were different. General Lee lived decades after the war that enshrined his loss and, according to my grandmother, was often seen during her childhood riding his white horse, Traveler, through the streets of Richmond. She recalled with delight one day when she was out walking with her African-American nanny and saw the general approaching majestically on his horse. Seeing the pretty little girl, all frills and white lace, the general asked for her to be lifted up and seated her in front of him on her saddle. As they rode decorously down the street, Grandmother developed an idealized version of the past that would govern her life and her writing. The grand figure of the noble General engendered it.

He was, according to her, not only the handsomest man in the world but a model of civic righteousness. When Grandmother, her family and friends—with their marriageable daughters in tow—retreated to the hills of West Virginia to escape Richmond’s intolerable summer heat, they stayed at a big resort they called “The dear old Greenbriar,” later to provide underground spaces for a Cold War Washington hide-out.

At The Greenbriar, there were dances every evening, and at one of them, to the horror and astonishment of the other guests, a Jewish family was present. No one would dance with that daughter until General Lee rose and led her onto the floor.

Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, as in the case of Grandmother’s mythic ride. But as we know with the myths that have distorted U.S. history from the beginning—please look at the writing of the so-called Founding Fathers—whether a myth has any basis in the truth is not the point. Myths embalm our prejudices for time eternal. And so my beloved grandmother on her chaise lounge gave me the poisoned fruit of her poisoned idealism. Even then, at ten or eleven, I somehow knew to spit it out.

In My Family, Politics 21 Favorites of 2021 The Lost Cause Helena Lefroy Caperton Richmond United Daughters of the Confederacy